Can Two Dozen Marginal Ways to Treat Aging be Combined into One Useful Therapy?

Comparatively little work on combinations of therapies takes place in the research community. I suspect this to be a matter of regulatory incentives. For example there is little room for commercial entities to be able to make money by combining established treatments owned by other entities. Similarly for researchers, the world of possible approaches is balkanized by intellectual property, while the disposition of the majority of research funding is ultimately guided by the promise of a pot of gold at the end of the road. That pot of gold is much harder to obtain when someone else owns the therapies involved, and all that is being done is to apply them together. The edifice of intellectual property is a great evil, and this is one of many reasons why that is the case. Given this long-standing state of affairs, there is at present little data to guide our expectations on the bounds of the possible when it comes to combining large numbers of therapies in search of additive and synergistic effects. Some people think that we should forge ahead in the matter of slowing aging: take every intervention with good evidence to date, and run large numbers of them in the same mice to see what happens. Should we believe that various ways of manipulating the operation of cellular metabolism demonstrated to achieve 5-10% life extension in mice can combine to double life span in that species? Intuition suggests not, but I don't think it to be completely out the question. Nor is it unre...
Source: Fight Aging! - Category: Research Authors: Tags: Of Interest Source Type: blogs